Thursday, April 24, 2014

One thing I love to see is third party companies publishing PowerShell tools for their software and hardware products. The more companies do it, the more strategic, de facto, PowerShell becomes. I love it when a plan comes together as a great American Colonel once said.

HP has just published a set of PowerShell cmdlets that provide tools for IT pros to configure an HP Server. You can see the announcement here, and the full spec of what was released here. And for the brave, download the cmdlets here.

Monday, April 21, 2014

CloudComputingAdmin.com has a nice article discussing managing Windows Azure IAAS using PowerShell. The article discusses installing the latest version of the PowerShell cmdlets (0.7.4) and shows how to do some common operations, including creating an Azure VM and removing an Azure VM. If you are looking at or using Azure, then you should investigate these cmdlets.

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

So, after years of anticipation, today is the day we say good bye to Windows XP. Today, XP has finallyi reached end of life (at least for most home and corporate users). The patches being released today are the last most users will ever see.

From today. XP is EOL. There will be no more patches, and from next month, patches released for Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.x will telegraph to the hackers where vulnerabilities in XP may lie.

Is it xxall gloom and doom? No – of course not. For some users, at least, Microsoft has agreed to continue supporting XP. The UK government recently announced such an extension although it came with a big price tag. And all those ATM systems that run XP are also given a bit of breathing space.

But what if you are a normal corporate user, or normal home user? Well, if all you do is just get email from GMAIL/Outlook.com etc, and maybe do a bit of Skyping with the grandparents/grandkids, you will probably be fine. But if you go to a lot of sites, using IE, and have a habit of clicking on links you find in Twitter, Facebook, etc – your risk begins soon. I liken it to traveling to a country with active Polio, or other diseases without having your shots. Yes, you may be just fine – but you may also pick up a very nasty disease.

So what should you do? If you are a home user, you really should move off of XP. My personal recommendation is to move to Windows 8.1. If the new UI is too much pain, then either use Windows 7, or just buy Start8 by Stardock to get you over the Modern blues. If you are a corporate customer still running XP, you need to get your IT department to upgrade.

I am certain that there are a lot of users, some who are reading this blog post, who haven’t moved and who may not move. After all XP works, doesn’t it? Why spend money needlessly? The reason, simply, is risk. The longer you wait to upgrade, the more time the hackers have to craft attacks.

I loved XP back in the day. The early beta versions were full of promise, and after SP2, we saw that promise turn into a great OS. But it has come to the end of life. Let it go and upgrade.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

Dot sourcing is a feature of PowerShell whereby scripts are run in the scope of the caller rather than a separate sub-scope. When you dot source, variables, functions, psdrives, etc that were created in the script persist in the callers scope. Had you run the same script normally, these objects would have instantiated for the duration of the script then removed and garbage collected. Dot sourcing was, pre V4, a way of creating scripts of functions and then bringing them into the current scope – although with v2, the module does a better job.

I've been reading over on Virtualization Review, that VMware has released a new version of vSphere Power CLI (PowerShell cmdlets to manage VMware vSphere.

The article on VR notes that this release includes bug fixes, improvements and new features. New features include the ability to connect to vCentrer SRJM,. support for PowerShell V4and support for IPv6. You can get the full list of feature here. And for some more background on this release see this article by Alan Renouf.

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Desired State Configuration is a feature of PowerShell V4, but one that was quite incomplete. In V4, IMHO, DSC is a really cool proof of concept. It works for a limited set of resources, but is not complete. Microsoft (and the community) need to, and are, publishing more resources. I suspect that V5 of PowerShell will see the completion or near completion of the resources needed by IT pros to manage most data centres.